Digital innovation hazards in public sector organizations : A research conducted in the context of the Risk Assurance department of PwC Nederland

The aim of this research is to increase the knowledge about digital innovation hazards in public sector organizations. Digital innovation is, just like for commercial sector organizations, very important for public sector organizations. Digital innovation can facilitate in improving the quality of products, services and service delivery, and it can decrease costs. Moreover, it can help to prevent public sector organizations’ operational activities from being disrupted by innovations from the commercial sector organizations. However, innovation implies some degree of risk and various innovation barriers are repressing the will to innovate within public sector organizations. When the management pushes for a stricter management of these hazards, it is often at the expense of the organization’s innovation program. By giving suggestions to public sector organizations about what an effective way of managing these digital innovation hazards can be, the complexity among the digital innovation hazards can be decreased. This can lead to a more efficient innovation program, with a better performance. This research discusses how public sector organizations implement digital innovations, what kind of risks and barriers they face during the implementation process and what actions can mitigate or avoid these digital innovation hazards. It addresses research gaps of scientific research on digital innovation hazards within the public sector. This research builds on existing literature about digital innovation, risk management, the public sector, chatbots and communication science. Based on the prior literature, a qualitative approach was chosen and a case study, using interviews as a source of primary data collection, was conducted. In addition, a focus group was conducted among domain specialists within PwC Nederland to generate professional perspectives on the studied subject. Results show that implementing digital innovations in public sector organizations is indeed a risky business, since various types of risks arise during the implementation process. Besides that, eleven different innovation barriers are discovered, that are repressing the will to innovate within public sector organizations. Finally, there are nine actions suggested, that public sector organizations can perform to mitigate or avoid some of the discovered digital innovation hazards